Don't call it a comeback: Steve Cohen rebrands online

An image of Point72's website, www.point72.com, from Feb. 3, 2015. Point72 is a family office for billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen.

For years, billionaire investor Steve Cohen assiduously avoided the press. Few photos of him existed, and the standard response to a media inquiry—like many other hedge funds—was "no comment." SAC Capital Advisors' rudimentary chess-themed website, www.sac.com, listed a few jobs and was otherwise restricted to clients.

Not anymore.

The latest effort by legally beleaguered Cohen to rebrand himself is www.point72.com, a glossy website for his personal money management firm, Point72 Asset Management. Launched Monday, it emphasizes ethics, community engagement and career opportunities—a clear effort to move beyond SAC's guilty plea to criminal insider trading charges and $1.8 billion in fines.

"Point72.com more formally introduces the firm, our businesses and our senior leadership to the world," spokesman Mark Herr said in an email explaining the move. "The site announces what we at Point72 stand for—ethics, excellence, opportunity, innovation and leadership—and allows us to define ourselves, rather than be defined by others."

Point72 manages about $10 billion in assets, the vast majority of it Cohen's, plus some employees. The shop, which focuses on trading stocks, made about $3 billion gross of expenses in 2014, according to a person familiar with the situation.

The site includes a biography of Cohen and a quote from him on a "Mission & Values" page: "I want Point72 to be a great firm with a strong sense of community that always acts with integrity and professionalism and sets the standard for ethical behavior."

The site also notes Cohen's charitable work through the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation and describes the family office as the future "destination for the industry's best and brightest talent."

Point72 doesn't appear to have a recruiting problem; the family office hired 78 analysts last year and launched a campus recruiting program for undergraduates, according to Herr.

There is no mention of insider trading issues on the site. Cohen's problems in that regard amounted to arguably the largest scandal in the hedge fund industry's history.

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara described "pervasive and unprecedented institutional misconduct" at SAC in a statement in November on the hedge fund firm's guilty plea

The new site does include a biography of former government prosecutor Vincent Tortorella, Point72's new chief compliance and surveillance officer, whose focus is on "improving the monitoring of contact and information flow."